A little more about the World War II days.

I was looking on the Internet to see if I could find out how much we got in rationed food items during the war. I found a chart that showed some of the food items. Below it shows how much per person you got for a week. There were four people in our family.

Per Person--Per Week

Cheese - one and a half ounces
Butter/ Margarine - seven ounces
Cooking fats (Shortening or Lard) 7 ounces
Sugar - 8 ounces
Chocolate and Sweets- 4 ounces
Liquid milk - 3 pints
Bacon and Ham - 2 ounces a fortnight (14 days)
All meat was rationed. Mainly you could get hamburger or roasts with your stamps, if the butcher had any. You could not get steaks. Liver, Heart, Tripe, Brains, etc were not rationed.

Other items were rationed too--Gasoline, shoes, boots, some clothing. You could not get rubber tires.

I was still in High School when the war started. I will tell you a story about my Cooking Class.

In our Cooking Class, we were learning how to cook with some of the Wartime recipes. We all had partners in our cooking class. One day we had to make this recipe for Scrambled Eggs and Brains. Our teacher said that everyone had to take at least one bite. I knew I would die right there if I did and so did my partner. We had our forks out and were stirring this horrible mess around on our plates acting like we were going to eat. We had a waste basket by us and we were keeping an eye on the teacher and as soon as she started down the next row, we dumped ours in the waste basket and threw a cloth towel over the top. We kept inching our basket under the table when the teacher wasn't looking. When our teacher came back to our table, our plates were empty. I guess she trusted us because we were both good students. I did get an A in Homemaking. I don't know if anybody else did the same thing because we were too busy with our own problem.

I had told you the story about stockings last time too. I found this article on the Rationing articles I was reading.

"One of the most unusual items affected by the war was Women's stockings. With an embargo on Japanese silk, nylon was promptly drafted to make parachutes--and each chute required the equivalent of 36 pairs of stockings. The fashion and technology of Women's hosiery at the time was to show a dark seam up the back of the leg. With no stockings to be had, some enterprising young women applied leg makeup in place of stockings, using an eyebrow pencil to draw the seam up the back."

Once I was out of High School and went to work for the Newspaper, I really could see what was going on with the war. We had a Teletype so we got news fairly quickly. Messages didn't travel instantly like they do today.